Rappler CEO @MariaRessa: social media worshipper in 2012, now a social media demoniser in 2017! 😮

All of a sudden, Rappler CEO Maria Ressa is highlighting the "horrors" of social media, perhaps because she now perceives herself and the organisation she leads as its "victims".

Interesting, considering Ressa and her crew of "online journalists" gushed ad nauseum about the power of social media to further their agenda just a small number of years ago.

In the 2012 Rappler "report" Social media for social change, Rapplerette Carmela Fonbuena built her thesis on what was then the Social Media Gospel According to Ressa that preached how social media is the be-all-end-all new wave tool for "nation-building".

Rappler CEO and executive editor Maria Ressa said that with rapidly changing technology, television could be a casualty. 

“Why are we all talking about social media? Because of these really, really big numbers,” Rappler CEO and executive director Maria Ressa said. 

“We know that traditional media is dying. Traditional media will no longer exist in the form you know it now," Ressa, who was also former head of ABS-CBN news and current affairs, asserted during the "Social Media for Social Change" chat series held Thursday, January 12.

The event Fonbuena cites was a virtual orgy of mutual high-fiving amongst the social media cheerleaders of that time which included keynote speaker  Veronica Pedrosa of Al Jazeera.

“Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control,” she said. 

Citing an Ogilvy study, Pedrosa said Asians, in particular, have always trusted social networks more than centers of money, power, or authority.

On cue...

Ressa, for her part, said the source of social media's power is its ability transmit and amplify emotions the way traditional media has not been able to.

Hindsight. It's a bitch. The clarity it delivers does not discriminate on the basis of which side of the bullshit equation you happen to be.